February 6, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The office of Carter Burden, a New York City Council member, was getting bombarded with phone calls from elderly constituents.
It was the early 1970s, and callers were asking for help with problems facing vulnerable older people, such as how to get help they needed to remain in their apartments.
Sensing the great need, Mr. Burden tapped his family’s philanthropic organization—the Florence V. Burden Foundation—and in 1971 used a $60,000 grant to hire a social worker to serve his Upper East Side district’s elderly residents.
Four decades later, the Carter Burden Center for the Aging, which now raises its $3.9-million annual budget from a combination of government and private sources, serves thousands of elderly New Yorkers from around the city.
“The Burden Center began by filling a gap, and as we’ve moved forward over the years we have continued to look at the community to see where there are gaps, and then we have filled those gaps with programs,” says William Dionne, the center’s executive director.
That mandate means that although the center provides the usual range of programs for older people—meals, activities, and classes—it also looks to enrich elderly New Yorkers’ connection to their city’s vibrant culture, says Mr. Dionne. For instance, last year, the charity gave out more than 5,000 tickets to 47 arts and cultural venues throughout New York.
It has also established Gallery 307, a prime 800-square-foot exhibition and studio space in the heart of the Chelsea art district. “There are so many professional artists in their 70s and 80s and even beyond, still really viable and working and healthy, utterly engaged in their careers—only to find that older artists are not viable for most galleries,” says Marlena Vaccaro, a program director who heads both the gallery and arts outreach and education at the Carter Burden Center. “Running Gallery 307 gives us a chance to give a wall back to older, professional artists as well as discover new older artists and to show this work to a public that wouldn’t be able to otherwise access this work.”
The gallery’s exhibits draw from a range of artists, some professional and some self-taught who only recently began to get involved in the arts. And yet others are artists who have dementia and other ailments—“people coming from a place that is so unique and individual that you couldn’t possibly explain to the general population without their being able to see it,” says Ms. Vacarro.
She adds, “What we’re really trying to say, to the wider community and the arts community specifically, is that older artists don’t need to be on the outside looking in.”
